To blame abundant food for obesity and not the fact that we make everything ultra addictive [0] seems like inverse logic to me.
I'm not saying that ultra-processed foods are fine. They are bad and very much part of the story. But it is not the whole story either.
Why is social media shit? Well, “the platforms are incentivized to demonstrate growth in profit to their investors, so they optimize their system for maximal engagement and retention over time, transferring the same incentive to creators, so many creators who would have made better work before desperately churn out poorly made material about whatever is popular and other, more interesting content is ultimately less common on the platform, with the root cause being the constant need for a growth in surplus in all areas of social production” is a better answer, but “it’s capitalism” is still an alright start.
I would blame our monkey brains instead. India has no shortage of traditional sweets that predate capitalism (Indians even knew sugar far before Europeans did), but in the previous crushing poverty that lasted millennia, only a tiny fragment of the Indian population had the opportunity to eat themselves to gout, diabetes, obesity etc. Now, almost every Indian can eat to satiety and beyond, for the first time in history. And the aftereffects show.
Capitalism is fairly efficient at providing people what they want. If our monkey brains crave sugar, sugary treats it will be.
We need to get our monkey brains under control, and not just with regard to sugar. At least some HNers are probably working on digitally addictive products, and then there are the old-fashioned drugs like alcohol and opiates, too.
Smoking down; office work up.
Eating is a quick dopamine hit which can be enjoyed WHILE working on boring shit at a desk.
Shoving potato chips in your face can make writing TPS reports less painful.
This is a great way to show you haven't visited those places in over a decade. They lagged behind in the takeover of addictive sugary crap. Now they're catching up in the same way. Korea is another great example that you didn't mention, the exact same has happened there.
The dissonance here is that your view of them being held up as such examples is from 2005, whereas your obesity statistics on them are from 2025. As soon as you update the former view to their situation as of 2025, you'll draw the exact opposite conclusion: an exact match.